Even though I'm from one of the largest cities in the United States, I have lived in Scandinavia for nearly 30 years. Where I live, there is a very well-known and respected law that says that everyone is free to pick mushrooms and wild berries in the woods and forests. Treasure hunting for these delicacies is a delight and a national past time. Finding a special place that is rich in Chantarelle, a savoury and gourmet mushroom that is golden in color, is liken to finding a deep vein of gold that you can return to season after season and harvest large baskets full. There is even a special word that literally means "the place where wild strawberries grow" that is used to describe someone's favorite little spot. When you tell people that you have found whole baskets full of Chantarelles or have harvested several buckets full of blueberries, you leave out where to find them. These are jealously guarded secrets.
And even from an ecological viewpoint, it is also very important that everyone goes to different woods and different parts of the woods to find these fruits of the earth. If everyone were to go to the very same spot, the mushrooms and berries would perish very quickly, leaving absolutely nothing to be picked and gathered. Until a few decades ago, no one would even tell you how to find them; you would have to learn this from close friends and family, or from trial and error.
This fall, I was reminded of this fact when on a walk in the woods with a new friend, Li, who is from China, and her son Anton. We stopped and picked the last blueberries and raspberries to be found in the season. With blueberry-stained lips and teeth, Anton smiled gleefully as we meandered and chatted along the path. When we stopped for a while to eat blueberries and raspberries in the wild, she mentioned the fact that her Scandinavian husband kept shishing her and changing the subject when she asked some people where they found their Chantarelles. Her husband kept saying that you can't ask that question and would change the subject again. And she would repeatedly try to make herself understood: "but I want to know where they found them!" she would ask in a thick Chinese accent, and nobody would answer her. I told her that the reason is because finding Chantarelle and wild berries in the woods is like finding a valuable treasure and is a great favorite past time of many Scandinavians.
The pleasure and satisfaction lies not only in the discovery of your own special Chantarelle place, but in the search itself. After searching long and hard and not finding any you finally ready to give up, thinking that there is nothing more you can do, and lo and behold, you discover the chantarelles were there all along, right under your very feet. But this awareness brings also a responsibility to be careful of the woods so that the chantarelles and wildberries will continue to grow and you and others may reap the rewards of the earth, even for generations to come.
The path is just as important as the goal.
This real-life analogy to marketing/business illustrates that there are many secrets to success that are jealously guarded, or just concealed from your site due to a lack of knowledge. Before, many marketing "gurus" and experts kept quiet about how to succeed in online marketing. I have experience of this myself. I bought book after book, course after course, to learn about the secrets, which continued to elude me. What I didn't realize is that the gurus would only tell us seekers so much and leave out some vital piece of information. The would- be marketer was then left on their own to try to succeed under trail and error. Of course, the answers were there all along, right in front of us, but "until you have eyes to see..." you will not understand, and at other times, it was like the blind leading the blind.
We need the tools and knowledge of internet marketing, but we do need to create products and services for "our own neck of the woods", otherwise we will be like a grain of sand in the Sahara desert.
Following the advice of some "gurus" you should "milk the cow while you can" and think only of the short term, giving the idea that it is possible for everyone to market to the same customer base. There is also often a complete focus only on the money to be made, and not on the service that you will provide. Nor the fact that you must use your very special strengths and skills. Your business is, after all, something that you must also love doing. As the saying goes: "Do what you love and the money will follow."
In blissful ignorance, we blame outer circumstances for our failures. "Blissful" because with awareness comes not only love but also responsibility, and there is no one else to blame when something goes wrong. When we have a business that we love working at, and if we want repeated business, we must not only be an expert in our chosen fields; we must also take responsibility, for the products we sell and for our relationship to our customers and to ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to find our own special niche, that special something that we would love doing. Otherwise, that deep vein of gold will be dug out in no time. No longer will we be able to find chantarelles and berries in the wild because we shall have long since taken every last one and destroyed the very means by which they grew.
Just some food for thought.
Angela Wickenberg
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